


Nor Iron Bars ...

by kosmickway (KMDWriterGrl)



Category: CSI: Crime Scene Investigation
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-02-11
Updated: 2014-02-11
Packaged: 2018-01-11 22:09:37
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 643
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1178528
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/KMDWriterGrl/pseuds/kosmickway
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Gil helps Sara through nightmares with poetry. A one-shot post-"Dead Doll." The poem Gil recites is "To Althea, From Prison" by Richard Lovelace.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Nor Iron Bars ...

He can tell when she’s having one of her bad days. She gets a certain look in her eye. The easy slightly-sensual swing falls out of her long-legged gait and her shoulders take on a hard tension that speaks of knots and stiff sections of muscle. She looks down at the floor just a little more often than she normally would, lets her hair fall forward into her face and stay there when she’d normally brush it back with a careless hand. She smiles but it’s a phantom smile, a ghost of the full-wattage, gap-toothed, Sara smile that he’s glad to wake to every morning. 

On her bad days she can go from smirk to sobbing fit in the space of an hour, dependent entirely upon whichever demons are plaguing her on that particular day. On her bad days she aches to be held, and he takes the greatest pleasure in settling with her on the couch, her head in his lap, his hands stroking the lines off of her forehead, combing his fingers through the espresso spill of her hair. 

It had been a bad day. Since 3am she’s been restless with nightmares. Her body is a brightly burning furnace next to his, her skin heated with the struggle to overcome specters and skeletons. When he reaches over to touch her forehead, he feels the slick sheen of sweat beading under his fingertips. She groans softly, tosses her head, burrows closer to him, pressing her hip against his. He murmurs gentle reassurances, soothing with his voice, fingers sweeping up into her hair to loosen the tangles. 

“Gil,” she murmurs, voice small with sleep, fear, and the uncertainties that plague her dreams. 

“Right here, honey.” He throws the covers back, anticipating the first move she always makes when she wakes from a bad dream. “Water?”

“Mmmhmm.” There’s still a little girl note of fear in her voice that makes his heart twist. 

He hands her the plastic bottle she keeps next to the bed and watches her gulp. When she’s had her fill, she sets it on the floor next to her side of the bed and returns to lay her head on his bare chest. He strokes her damp hair, feels her flushed cheeks searing against his skin.

“The usual?”

“She was slashing my face with a straight razor, flaying my cheeks, my forehead.” Sara shudders and wraps her arms tighter around him, pressing hard against his chest as if to sink into his skin for security. 

“She’ll never have you,” he whispers. “Not while I’ve got you.”

“I don’t want her to do this to me. I don’t want her in my head.” 

“I know, baby.” He slides his hands under her shirt and up and down her back, tracing small circles with his fingers. “Just try to relax. Try to sleep.” To stave off protestations, he murmurs, 

_“_ _When love with unconfined wings/Hovers within my gates/And my divine Althea brings/To whisper at the grates;/When I lye tangled in her hair,/And fettered to her eye,/The birds, that wanton in the air,/Know no such liberty.”_

Her breathing begins to even out and, on the edge of sleep, she sighs the last lines of the poem that he so often whispers to her on these bad nights. 

“Stone walls do not a prison make,/Nor iron bars a cage;/Minds innocent and quiet take/That for an hermitage;/If I have freedom in my love,/And in my soul am free,/Angels alone that soar above/Enjoy such liberty.”

Sara’s fallen asleep on his chest, her hair still damp with sweat, her body slowly receding from its feverish state. Gil eases her onto the pillow next to him, tucks her against the curve of his body, plays his fingers over her hip until he, too, falls asleep.


End file.
